Knotty Office Speakers

[Brian Steele]

While it might look weird, there's nothing acoustically wrong with reversing the position of the drivers, to bring the tweeter closer to ear level. Put a grille on the speakers, and no-one will know :-)

[Billet]

Boxes and crossover look really excellent, nice job. That is a very creative use of grounding strips for connections, I like it. I totally agree about using nice looking wood and not over finishing it, looks better IMO.

As you are clearly aware, good sounding bass is not easy to achieve.

[mdocod]

Made some changes:

Pulled the crossover to the outside and made it a conversation piece.

Replaced the W5's with E150HE-44's.

Added a lot of driver weight but the crossovers moving outside roughly compensates.

The front baffles on these aren't thick enough to be flush mounting these heavy drivers so they are just surface mounted.

Changed some crossover components to work with new woofer. Decided to ditch the iron cores and electrolytic caps in favor of air/poly. Yikes those 90uF caps are YUGE! pretty cool looking! Pulled the crossover down to around 400hz.






The woofer swap fixed the response hiccup centered around 150hz and really cleaned up the critical low mid-range. The W5's just don't take well to passive crossover and really needed a bigger box, and just didn't present the same low-distortion that the other drivers in the design were capable of. The E150's blend so much smoother and honestly sound noticeably better in the bad room, even wall mounted. That strange shaped hook in the response couldn't be solved with the usual bass adjustment knob found on many integrated amps and such. The E150 on the other hand has a smooth rolloff that takes well to basic bass adjustment. The bass went from sounding kinda boomy on the top end and non-existant on the bottom end (in this room) to balanced/rich sounding, and the low mid-range from 100-600hz, where tons of vocal energy resides now sounds like it's coming from a truly high-end speaker.

[mdocod]

We're using a little Aiyima A05 to power them. It's a no-frills nothing special dirt cheap chip-amp with a bluetooth receiver/DAC. Even when I let it rip after hours it only gets slightly warm to the touch after running a long time. It's remarkably efficient....

Review: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...plifier.26440/

I may look into a better amplifier at some point. Maybe after Rev-2 of the crossover. For now I think most of the disappointing aspects of these speakers can be traced to where they are mounted and some of the crossover design compromises.

[djg]

Nice job, nice documentation, thanks.

[chrisn]

Pics work for me, now I want a cold Mountain Dew... I don't know the specs of the amp you are using with them, but some of the small ones fart out with something power hungry. +1 on buying more clamps than you'll ever need. I've got dozens and end up needing more sometimes

[Steve Lee]

Yay! All pics showed up today and what a nice job you did on these speakers, sir.

[Chris Roemer]

Well, today I can see a couple dozen images (posts Home - #4), but I have to view with "Posts" clicked, instead of "Latest Activity" (which is my default view).
But MANY threads act like this (where I have to click on "Posts" to see any images).

[mdocod]

I just viewed this thread from another browser with no site data or my login, and I believe I am seeing what yall are seeing.... "empty" photos.

I tried uploading the missing files again, and now it's just attaching them all to the end of the post, I then "injected" them over the missing photos, and it's still insisting on putting them at the end of the post as well as where I inserted them.

This is absolutely abysmal.... Almost as bad as sanding and painting over and over again only to see differently bad results.

If there are any site admins or devs reading this thread, please, I beg you, fix the photo handling situation here. This is terrible!

[Wolf]

No mo photo
Wolf

[mattk]

No pics

[Steve Lee]

Nice write-up but a lot of pics don't show up for me either, sir.

[djg]

hopefully, people will comment.

[mdocod]

None of your pictures show for me after post Home

I did hand to hand combat with the forums interface last night for many hours to try to inject the photos. They are showing for me. I wonder if I'm the only one that can see them? That seems weird...

[djg]

None of your pictures show for me after post number one.

Note to self, don't use hashtag symbol.